To evaluate the impact of message framing on attitudes towards messages aimed at promoting the use of nutritional warnings, behavioural intention and actual behaviour, evaluated through visual attention to nutritional warnings and the choice of a snack product during a real choice task.

Following a between-subjects design, participants were exposed to loss-framed nutrition messages, gain-framed nutrition messages or non-nutrition-related messages (control group). After evaluating the messages, participants were asked to select a snack product as a compensation for their participation. The experiment was conducted using an eye tracker.

Montevideo (Uruguay).

Convenience sample of 201 people (18–51 years old, 58 % female).

The average percentage of participants who fixated their gaze on the nutritional warnings during the choice task was slightly but significantly higher for participants who attended to nutrition messages (regardless of their framing) compared with the control group. Participants who attended to loss-framed messages fixated their gaze on the warnings for the longest period of time. In addition, the healthfulness of the snack choices was higher for participants exposed to nutrition-related messages compared with the control group.

Results from the present work suggest that nutrition messages aimed at increasing awareness of nutritional warnings may increase consumers’ visual attention and encourage more heathful choices. The framing of the messages only had a minor effect on their efficacy.

Nutritional warnings have recently been suggested as a simplified front-of-pack nutrition labelling scheme to facilitate citizens’ ability to identify unhealthful products and discourage their consumption. However, citizens’ perspective on this policy is still under-researched. The objective of the present work was to study how citizens perceive nutritional warnings and to evaluate public support of this policy, with the goal of deriving recommendations for the design of policy measures accompanying the introduction of nutritional warnings.

An online survey with 1416 Uruguayan citizens, aged 18–75 years, 61 % female, was conducted. Participants had to answer a series of questions (open-ended and multiple-choice) related to their perception of warnings as a front-of-package nutrition labelling scheme.

Participants showed a positive attitude towards nutritional warnings, which were regarded as easy to understand and to identify on food packages. The majority of respondents emphasized that they would take nutritional warnings into account when making their food choices, stating that they would allow them to make informed choices and, consequently, to increase the quality of their diet and their health status. Health motivation appeared as a crucial driver for taking nutritional warnings into consideration.

A high level of public support for nutritional warnings was observed. Responses can be used to derive a range of recommendations for a policy mix that should synergistically support the introduction of nutritional warnings and encourage citizens to take them into account when making their food purchases.

The current study aimed to assess Uruguayan consumers’ accounts of their own need to change their dietary patterns, their intended changes and the barriers related to doing so, and to compare the intentions and barriers with the recommendations of the national dietary guidelines.

An online survey with 2381 Uruguayan employed adults, aged between 18 and 65 years, 65 % females, was conducted. Participants had to answer two open-ended questions related to changes they could make in the foods they eat and/or the way in which they eat to improve the quality of their diet and the reasons why they had not implemented those changes yet. Content analysis using inductive coding by two researchers was used to analyse the responses.

Consumers mainly intended to change consumption of types of foods, particularly eating more fruits, vegetables and legumes and consuming less flour, but also intended to alter their eating patterns. Lack of time and the fact that healthy foods are perceived as being more expensive than unhealthy foods were major barriers to behaviour change. Some of the recommendations of the dietary guidelines, particularly those related to enjoying cooking and meals and engaging in it as a social activity, were not represented in consumer accounts.

Accompanying policies to the dietary guidelines need to underline the importance of changes in dietary patterns, including greater enjoyment and sharing food preparation and meals in the company with others, address misconceptions about flour, and provide concrete, consumer-derived recommendations on how to enact the guidelines.

To identify and assess healthy eating policies at national level which have been evaluated in terms of their impact on awareness of healthy eating, food consumption, health outcome or cost/benefit.

Review of policy documents and their evaluations when available.

European Member States.

One hundred and twenty-one policy documents revised, 107 retained.

Of the 107 selected interventions, twenty-two had been evaluated for their impact on awareness or knowledge and twenty-seven for their impact on consumption. Furthermore sixteen interventions provided an evaluation of health impact, while three actions specifically measured any cost/benefit ratio. The indicators used in these evaluations were in most cases not comparable. Evaluation was more often found for public information campaigns, regulation of meals at schools/canteens and nutrition education programmes.

The study highlights the need not only to develop harmonized and verifiable procedures but also indicators for measuring effectiveness and success and for comparing between interventions and countries. EU policies are recommended to provide a set of indicators that may be measured consistently and regularly in all countries. Furthermore, public information campaigns should be accompanied by other interventions, as evaluations may show an impact on awareness and intention, but rarely on consumption patterns and health outcome.